Eight Hundred and Forty Inches
by Elanor Joy
Summary: It's not that Rapunzel necessarily misses her hair. Her most vibrant memories of growing up are interwoven with feelings of loathing for the long strands and intense relief for their magic. One Shot.


_Author's Note: After spending two days and four viewings of __Tangled__ with a gaggle of cousins under five, I can't help but write based on ideas that have nagged at me ever since.. Hopefully my muse will let me get back to my numerous term papers before I fail my classes. Enjoy!_

_**Disclaimer: I do not own **__**Tangled**__**, nor would I consider it flattering if you thought I did. **_

**~*~**Eight Hundred and Forty Inches~*~

It's not that Rapunzel necessarily misses her hair. Her most vibrant memories of growing up are interwoven with feelings of loathing for the long strands and intense relief for their magic. The incongruous emotional attachment she had to her lost locks makes her feel a little crazy. Eugene and her parents have assured her that her feelings are reasonable and that she is, in fact, not crazy. Even after much contemplation, though, she still wonders. After all, how long can one's hair get before it starts to get to you?

Her mother's favorite story about her babyhood was how she had gurgled along to the healing song as her mother brushed her hair at night. Her first full sentence was a disjointed version of the spell. She remembers the intense relief and delight her mother would express after her youth had been restored. She has associated her hair with life since she was too young to remember. At the same time though, she has always associated her hair with a certain amount of annoyance. It would develop into resentment, loathing, even hate as she grew.

When she was four and it was sixteen feet long, she'd tripped over her hair for the first time. She had been running to down the stairs and her feet and her hair had gotten twisted together, causing her to slip, trip and fall down the last three steps. She'd scraped her knees, hurt her wrist, and pulled her hair so hard she hadn't let her mother touch it for a week. It was her first memory of wishing she could cut her hair.

She had started getting headaches when she was six. Supporting twenty feet of enchanted strands exhausted her neck and shoulders within an hour after she woke up in the morning, and by noon she was in so much pain that she had to lie down until dinner. It was then that she had began to entertain herself with art, as she could do so sitting or lying down, which took the pressure off her neck, shoulders, and scalp. She will never forget the moment she took a piece of charcoal that had escaped the ash bucket and began to draw pictures with it. Her mother, taking note of the child's new fascination with creating pictures, had taken pains to procure different types of supplies for her. Rapunzel had instantly taken to paint. One time she had tried painting the floor; her shoulders had ached too much to reach to the wall. But when she got up and her hair dragged through the wet paint on the floor, it had both ruined her pictures and soiled her hair.

When she was eight and it was twenty-eight feet long, her scalp had toughened up and her neck and shoulders were strong enough to support her hair for most of the day. However, she was more active now, and her hair was more difficult. She wasn't strong enough to wield it usefully yet. It was constantly getting in the way or getting snagged on something or wrapping itself around furniture, causing her to have to retrace her steps several times a day in order to accomplish anything. Her annoyance with it often left her in angry tears. At that point, she began to almost daily wish she could cut it off, just for convenience's sake.

At age twelve, when puberty hit and her hair started getting greasier, her mother had decided it was time for Rapunzel to wash her hair on her own. She couldn't wash her forty-eight feet of hair all at once, so she had to wash it a few feet at a time, starting at her scalp and working her way to the ends. It took her two full days to wash it all. The first time she tried to by herself, she had started at the bottom and worked her hair into such a state of wet knots that she had begged her mother to let her cut them out rather than deal with the rat's nest it had become. Her mother had accused Rapunzel of wanting to slowly kill her, working her into such a state of guilt that she had submitted to a careful combing out of the knots that had taken four days. It was then that she began to actually resent her hair.

The next year, her mother left her alone for two full days for the first time. When she returned, Rapunzel was horrified to see how the woman had aged. Her hair was streaked with grey for the first time, her skin had more wrinkles than she'd ever seen, and the woman's state of weakness after ascending the tower was terrifying. She had sang the song three times as her mother languidly stroked her hair with a brush, and even though she regenerated instantly, Rapunzel had still snuck into her room that night to sing the song over her once more, just in case.

A year or two later, when her hair was around just over fifty-five feet long, she had become infatuated with the idea that she could style it. She had spent hours weaving it into complicated braids, coils and coifs, only for it to become hopelessly tangled. After several failed attempts, she gave up on the idea that her hair would ever do anything to enhance her beauty. She envisioned herself with a crown of braids, with a round bun atop her head, with it spilling about her face and shoulders in a mass of curls, like her mother's. She began to extensively plot out how she would cut her hair-first to her feet, then her knees, her waist, her shoulders. It became a daily pastime for her.

On her fifteenth birthday, her mother had requested that she toss her hair out the window instead of the rope that they had used to haul her up for Rapunzel's entire life. When her mother had jerked on the blonde stream and yelled for her to start pulling, Rapunzel was shocked, but acquiesced to her mother's strange request. When she felt all of her mother's weight on the other end of her hair, she was so shocked that she stopped pulling. Her mother coaxed her to try again. This time, she was able to pull her a few feet off the ground before her arms gave out. The force of her mother's weight falling back to the ground nearly pulled Rapunzel out the window. Her mother gave a sharp cry when she landed and yelled furiously that the drop had hurt her ankle. Upon hearing this, Rapunzel was so horrified that pure adrenaline had hauled her mother up the tower. That time was the first that she'd used her hair to heal. The next day, after she'd lowered her mother out of the tower, she collapsed next to the window, her arms and legs and head aching.

From that point on, her hair had become a mere tool. She started to look at it as a useful extension of body. It took her months of practice, but she finally became so adept at using her hair that she stopped resenting it as much as started appreciating it. There were days, of course when her body would protest. Every now and then, if she was too active, her head and shoulders began to ache. Once, when she was sixteen, she tried to use her magical hair to heal her own body when her arms ached and her shoulders throbbed and her neck and head pulsated with pain from over-doing it. She had hated the way it made her feel, almost like she was cheating. She stuck to the medicines she and her mother made to help her pain after that.

The only time she had ever really appreciated her hair was during the time she spent with Eugene outside the tower. Using it to save his life on numerous occasions brought her a silly kind of delight. When she healed his hand with it, her insides had nearly burst with glee. The way he looked at her after it had been plaited by the little girls in the plaza, she had experienced a feeling of joy that she had never felt before. Never mind the fact that the heavy braid had made her head ache, she felt beautiful.

After she realized her mother was, in fact, not her mother, she had tried to run. She would never, ever, forget the way it felt when the woman had seized her hair and physically dragged her away from the window. She had tried to fight, tried to pull back, but to no avail. Gothel had turned her hair into bonds that effectively held Rapunzel still while the woman retrieved iron manacles and chains. She had never hated her hair more.

Until she found out she could, in fact, hate her hair more. When she heard Eugene calling for her to let down her hair, a cold knot of dread tied her insides as powerfully as her hair had bound her wrists minutes before. When Gothel threw her hair to her beloved, she internally begged for it to break, to tear, to fall out and leave her bald, anything to save him.

And, suddenly, just as quickly as she had detested her hair, she needed it again. When Gothel agreed to let her heal Eugene, she had never been more grateful for her hair in all her life. When he cut it, she was felt herself falling into an abyss of emotion and horror. As her hair dropped from her shoulders, she felt her head left involuntarily with newfound lightness. As she watched it fade dark as Gothel tried in vain to preserve it, she felt herself begin to drown in despair. Never in all the years that she had spent resenting her hair and wanting to cut it all off had she imagined that she would miss her hair so badly.

After Eugene had been restored to life, she had time to let it all sink in. Without her hair, she felt impossibly light, like Eugene's arms around her were the only thing holding her to the earth. Beyond the physical discomfort of feeling as though she were fly away at the slightest breeze, she felt emotionally lighter than she ever had. She couldn't tell if it was because she was free from her domineering mother or because of Eugene's love or because her lifelong shackles had finally been removed, but the sensation was incredible.

Every now and then, she would find herself missing it, when she needed something far away or when she couldn't reach quite high enough. For a long time, she felt like she was missing an arm, went through a stretch of clumsiness due to imbalance that lasted a full month. She even got phantom headaches from time to time. While her body took time to adjust to the absence it eventually did. But she sometimes felt like her psyche never would.


End file.
